


decide on us

by badskeletonpuns



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Didn't Know They Were Dating, Domesticity, F/M, Fluff, M/M, Multi, Mutual Pining, cuteness, mutual pining that eiffel thinks is unrequited
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-02
Updated: 2017-06-02
Packaged: 2018-11-08 05:24:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11074932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/badskeletonpuns/pseuds/badskeletonpuns
Summary: "The Subtle Approach Is Wasted On Douglas Eiffel," a memoir by Renée Minkowski and Dominik Koudelka. Or that post-Hephaestus minkaffel fic where there is only the lightest of angst and everything's happy in the end.





	decide on us

**Author's Note:**

> written for a prompt meme on tumblr that can be found [here!](http://wendy-comet.tumblr.com/post/155665909622/prompt-meme-minffel-20-post-series-one-sided) Title from The Lumineers' Sleep On The Floor.

Jealousy came sharp and immediate the moment the Hephaestus crew stepped off the shuttle and onto solid earth. Like appendicitis, or getting stabbed, or a better metaphor that Eiffel couldn’t come up with at that moment.  
   
The point was, it was not a nice feeling to walk off of an escape pod after over a year in space hell and have your best friend leave you to the camera mobs and literally run into her husband’s arms. He didn’t want to begrudge her the love shared between them, their eternal bond, him pining away for his wife who he thought had died, etc romantic declarations and dramatic kissing and so on and so forth. It was just - the shuttered eyes of the cameramen and reporters were so dark, and the lights flashing were so bright, and Earth’s gravity was a little more than he was used to.  
   
It was a little overwhelming, and it would have been nice to have her at his side during it. That was all.  
   
Look, Eiffel was fully prepared to accept his place on the top ten list of “World’s Most Selfish People”. He just wouldn’t tell her, it was _fine,_ he’d be _fine,_ Lord knows Douglas Eiffel should not get to ruin another one of the few perfect things in this world simply by being himself around it. Minkowski and Koudelka were very happy together before she left to space and they’d be happy again now, and all Eiffel had to do was not screw it up.  
   
… Yeah, that had about the same success rate as a snowball fight in Hell.  
   
The first big kerfuffle of press settled down eventually, and then the government swept in to integrate the astronauts into an Earth and a culture that was definitely different from their memories.  
   
Eiffel was legitimately surprised when Minkowski actually kept contact with him after they had both settled into their respective homes. They weren’t too far from each other - out of the original four crew members, only Hilbert had immediately moved as far away as he could get without leaving the planet.  
   
Earth had advanced without them, and Hera fit in a space far smaller than the station here. She didn’t seem to mind, other, not when there were causes to champion and movements to spearhead on behalf of artificial intelligences across the world.  
   
She still made time for her old human friends, when she could.  
   
Eiffel still missed her.  
   
**1\. Sleepy Renée Minkowski would be anyone’s kryptonite, okay?**  
   
It was on one of his and Minkowski’s planned movie nights that Eiffel’s resolution to never, ever admit his jealousy was first really tested.  
   
Koudelka usually came with them, but that night he had had a backlist of articles that needed his approval before publishing and he hadn’t been able to make it.  
   
That should have been Eiffel’s first clue that tonight was going to go a little differently than planned.  
   
Their movie that night was the newly released film of Hamilton on stage with the original Broadway crew, which, theoretically, would be a totally safe and non-romantic movie to watch with your platonic best friend. 

Which it was. Everything went great during the movie - Minkowski sang along shamelessly, Eiffel made fun of her while pretending he didn’t know all the lyrics himself, and they both pretended that the final song wasn’t making either of them tear up.  
   
No, the real danger came once the credits started rolling and Minkowski yawned. Eiffel would never tell her this because he liked living, but it was entirely possible that Renée Minkowski had the world’s cutest yawn. “I was up super late last night helping Dominik,” she told him, leaning heavily against the back of his couch. “Work’s been super intense lately for him, I think they’re pissed he won’t bother me for an interview for them.” She yawned again, and slumps over to the side.  
   
And, of course, because fate has it out for him, across Eiffel’s lap.  
   
He can’t move now. It would be like moving when a cat was lying on you, except if the cat was your former commanding officer and current crush and you know what, that metaphor was getting a little out of hand. Out of paw?  
   
Either way. Minkowski had passed out approximately two seconds after leaning on him, and her face was more relaxed than Eiffel had literally ever seen it on the Hephaestus. Her hair fell across his legs and the couch in tangled curls, the red standing out against the faded upholstery.  
   
She snored a little.  
   
Eiffel found it dangerously sweet. He didn’t end up moving until Koudelka called him almost an hour later to ask how the movie was, and if he could still join them. And, well, Eiffel had never been able to say no to either of them.  
   
He couldn’t bring himself to regret anything when the night ended with all three of them falling asleep on his terrible couch, even though they would all probably have backaches in the morning.  
   
**2\. Anniversaries are hard. So what if it isn’t technically his anniversary?**  
   
It was Minkowski and Koudelka - Minkowski and Dominik? It still felt too weird to call Minkowski by her first name, but Dominik felt a little less formal than Koudelka did and he had told Eiffel that it was fine.  
   
Either way. That was not the point. The point was that it was their anniversary - their first anniversary since Minkowski’s return from space.  
   
So it was like, a little bit of a big deal. Just a little.  
   
Eiffel had not planned to be involved in any of the preparations for it, but then that lunch with Dominik had happened a month or two before the day of. And he’d asked for Eiffel’s help, and it was not Eiffel’s fault that Dominik had had years being married to someone made of far sterner stuff than Eiffel to practice his puppy-eyes on.  
   
So he’d maybe been a little involved with the planning of it - the night at the theater, the dinner out, and the bottles of Minkowski’s favorite wine waiting at home for the happy couple.  
   
It didn’t bother him at all.  
   
He really, really wasn’t jealous of either of them.  
   
Or at least, he wasn’t until they stopped by his place before their date so that Dominik could thank him for all his help and drop off pizza from Eiffel’s favorite hole-in-the-wall shop.  
   
There were very, very few things that could distract Douglas Eiffel from pizza. The sight of Dominik Koudelka in a well-fitted tux, holding said pizza, with a slightly sheepish grin on his face, came very close to doing so.  
   
“Sorry to drop by unannounced,” he said, and held out the pizza as a peace offering. “I just wanted to thank you - it’s been a long time since Renée and I have been able to have a date night like this, and you were invaluable. So I brought pizza!”  
   
Eiffel grinned to cover up his own surprise, and took the pizza from Dominik. “You know the way to my heart, that’s for sure.”  
   
He glanced over at the car at the sound of the window rolling down, and Minkowski leaned out of it. “Dominik, I am fully aware that Eiffel can, on occasion, be not entirely useless, but we’re going to miss our reservation!”  
   
“Minkowski, there’s no way you two left anything less than oh, I don’t know, multiple hours early!” Eiffel called back at her. She was hanging partway out of the window in a ridiculous move that would probably toss her from the car the moment it started driving, and her hair was up and her dress was this ridiculously pretty emerald color and Eiffel was so, so doomed.  
   
She laughed, loud and exuberant. “You’re right, Eiffel. Just don’t steal my husband for too long, alright?” Minkowski disappeared back into the vehicle, and Eiffel turned back to Dominik in a vain attempt to salvage his dignity. (That suit was cut far too nicely and Dominik’s eyes were way too deep, and Eiffel was somehow even more doomed than before.)  
   
“Minkowski telling me I’m right? That’s not something you hear every day,” he joked, and Dominik smiled but didn’t laugh.  
   
Instead he stepped forward and pulled Eiffel into a hug, uncaring of the danger that pizza grease posed to his suit. “I think it should be said a little more often,” he said as he pulled away, grinning widely.  
   
Eiffel was fairly certain he was having a heart attack. “Yup,” he wheezed, as casually as he could manage. “Always right. That’s me.”  
   
“Alright, I better get going before we’re late to being early for our reservation,” Koudelka said, laughing. “See you tomorrow, Doug?”  
   
The car was already pulling away by the time Eiffel pulled himself together enough to shout “You two look incredible!” at the departing license plate, and he resigned himself to the ranks of the hopeless romantics.  
   
**3\. “The Subtle Approach Is Wasted On Douglas Eiffel,” a memoir by Renée Minkowski and Dominik Koudelka.**  
   
It had been almost a year since MInkowski and Dominik’s last anniversary, and both of them were beginning to act really, really weird.  
   
Secretive weird.  
   
See, Eiffel was fine with secretive. It was their anniversary coming up, after all, they deserved to have some privacy. They had grown back to knowing each other over this past year, and Dom probably didn’t need his help planning any more dates with Minkowski. It didn’t bother Eiffel. He didn’t feel like the third wheel for the first time in a long while, that would be a ridiculous and unreasonable feeling.  
   
Everything came to a head on the day of the anniversary.  
   
They didn’t drop by beforehand.  
   
Well, to be fair, if they had Eiffel would have had no idea that it was beforehand or afterhand or whateverhand of anything, because he still had no goddamn idea what they were doing and it _still didn’t bother him._ He had plenty of movies to watch by himself, and he’d even ordered a pizza from the chain on the other side of the block. It had faster delivery time than his favorite shop did and he just - didn’t feel like waiting up tonight.  
   
The knock on the door came sooner than he expected, and Eiffel didn’t even register it until the deliverer knocked a second time. 

"Just a second!” he shouted, and paused the TV before heading over to the door.  
   
He could honestly say that he would have expected Cutter himself to be grinning at his doorstep holding a pizza and asking for a more expensive tip than he deserved than the scene that greeted him.  
   
It was Dominik and Minkowski, dressed in pajamas with what looks like pizza from his favorite store, as well as soda, ice cream, and a plethora of other movie treats.  
   
“Can I put this in the freezer?” Minkowski asked, and Eiffel was too shell-shocked to do anything other than nod and step out of her way. She stepped a little further into his space than was maybe necessary on her way by, smiled a little more intimately than he was really used too, and Eiffel was about ninety nine percent sure he was dreaming.  
   
“Surprise!” Dominik says, still standing on the doorstep. Eiffel snapped out of his reverie and takes the boxes of pizza from the other man’s arms and they both stepped inside.  
   
Dominik explained some of what had been happening over the past couple of weeks as they put the food on the counter and get started hauling blankets from the hall closet to couch, putting the popcorn in, getting out paper towels for the pizza, etc.  
   
They had wanted this anniversary to be really special this year, and they really hadn’t wanted to leave Eiffel out of it. Plus, they had agreed that it would be really fun if the three of them had the same anniversary, instead of two different ones. “I really hope you don’t mind, Doug,” Dominik said, painfully earnest, and Eiffel was still pretty certain this was all a hallucination.  
   
“Wait, why are you including me in all this?” he asked, hoping that at least dream!Eiffel could get an answer that regular!Eiffel had yet to find. “I mean, not _just_ this here, but also definitely this here. The whole year, I mean. You guys never leave me out, and do not take this as me complaining. You two are amazing, but like, don’t you ever want time to go on dates without your permanent third wheel?”  
   
Dominik froze, and then whipped around to stare at Minkowski, who was extremely focused on the popcorn in the microwave. “You didn’t tell him?”  
   
“How was I supposed to bring that up!” she retorted. “It’s not really the sort of the thing that comes up in casual conversation.”  
   
They kept talking in circles around each other and Eiffel, and he may have been one of the more oblivious humans in the galaxy, but even he was starting to get a sense of where this was heading.  
   
“Wait, are you two flirting with me?”  
   
“Have been for the past year,” Minkowski said, and there was a laugh somewhere in her voice and a smile in her eyes, “but thank you for noticing.”  
   
That… That explained a hell of a lot.  
   
Eiffel smiled back at her and Dominik. “You know,” he said, “you really could have just said something to me, like, a year ago.”  
   
Dominik shrugged. “You’re right, Doug,” he admitted. “We really should listen to you more often.”  
   
“You’re damn right,” Eiffel declared. “Now come on, the pizza’s gonna get cold.”  
   
If someone had told the Eiffel from almost a year and a half ago, the one with microphones being shoved into his face and watching Renée Minkowski jump into her husband’s arms, that he was going to end up dating both Renée Minkowski and said husband, he would have laughed them out of the room. He’d been convinced that there was no possible way for that to happen in any universe.  
   
For once, Eiffel was really glad to be wrong. 


End file.
